Who Uses Firebird?

Because Firebird is free, there are no licences to count, no beans to count. It is known, from
reputable enterprise surveys, that Firebird is chugging away on hundreds of thousands of production
sites around the world. The following is a selection of companies and organisations that are
publicly known to be using Firebird:

Morfik P/L, Hobart, Tas., developers and vendors of WebOS development suite for construction
and maintenance of interactive websites, stores web objects in a Firebird meta-layer (system
database) as well as Firebird user data.

Deutsche Presse-Agentur GmbH, HQ in Hamburg, Germany, largest press agency in Germany,
provides a worldwide service to newspapers, magazines, TV and radio news networks.

KIMData, Munich, Germany, business intelligence systems and data warehousing for German
hospitals.

Deployment Samplings

Distributel, Telco Services Provider

Location: Canada

Contact: Dalton Calford (CTO)

Distributel is a long-distance telephone services provider with three corporate offices spanning three
cities and two provinces. It uses Firebird as the back-end to corporate information systems,
servicing an average staffing level of around 500 users. However, in-house information systems is
not the area where we use Firebird most heavily.

The real stress test comes from our customer load. We provide a wide variety of services, servicing
hundreds of thousands of customers, who process 2 million transactions a day. The whole shebang
is handled by one database, effectively.

We have three unmanned network Points of Presence (“PoPs”), each in a different
city, plus a development PoP in our testing lab. Each PoP has a dual telco switch system that
performs load balancing and acts as failover support in case one fails.

That equipment is very specific to our needs, but we control it all using Firebird. Each switch is
connected to two signal control processors (SCPs), which are slimline computers running Firebird.
That means that each PoP has four SCPs. Each SCP hosts two independent databases, meaning we
have 32 separate databases, all containing identical metadata and data.

If we lose a PoP, the other PoPs can take over the call, according to the “call state”. Of a possible
96 call states, only four are not recoverable. Each city keeps redundant dialogs with the SCPs from
other cities and the response dialogs are live-audited in real time.

For an indication of how fast the response has to be, when you pick up the phone, a signal goes
back to a telco switch, which then asks a SCP what to do. The general response is 'play dial tone
and wait for digits'. Dial tone is not automatic—it is the response of a query into the Firebird
database that checks line IDs, customer status, service notices (such as call answer) as well as
governmental warrant and privacy needs.

By law, we are only allowed one failure in 99,999 phone calls, the so-called “five
nines” that is said to define “enterprise-capable availability”.

Our customer service reps are also involved in updating the databases. Those databases
report real-time call information to the reps, as well as to the billing system, a Firebird database.
Besides storing and generating our Accounts Receivable, as one would expect, the database is also
concurrently queried by our interactive voice response units, the service personnel whom customers
call to inquire about their account status and their call history.

Prague Municipal Library

Location: Czech Republic

Contact: Ondrej Cerny, IT department manager

Prague Municipal Library oversees about 3,000,000 publications and has about 120,000 regular
(registered) users. The central library has many branches all over the city, of which about 20 are
currently connected to the IT center at the central library. Deployment is ongoing, with two or three
more branches going on-line each month, each adding about 5-10 new users using 10-50 new
attachments.

The library runs about 20 applications over a single Firebird database. Five are considered
as core
applications used by most users, handling normal library operations, public-access terminals (in
libraries) and public Internet access to book collections. These applications are used by 300-350
concurrent users during working hours, using between 400 and 600 connections to the single
database, which is currently about 30GB in size. Firebird handles 3-5 million transactions each day.
Other applications are specialised or daemon-like watchdog applications (sending out e-mails about
requested books etc.).

They run Linux Classic Firebird 1.5.2 on Red Hat 9 with a kernel tailored to handle 400-600 classic
instances. Hardware is a 4-CPU Xeon machine with 16Gb RAM and a 120Gb RAID 10 storage
array. They also have an 8-CPU Xeon with 20Gb RAM and a 500Gb RAID 10 to handle future
needs—recall that this is an ongoing deployment, so scale is rising steadily all the time.
The library does not operate 24/7. They have a maintenance window from midnight to 5 a.m. each
day, but the system must run without outages the rest of the time. Outages are not life-threatening
so they have a failover plan in place to restore operations in less than two hours in case the primary
system suffers a fatal failure.

Although they are very satisfied with Firebird, they do have problems with old applications
still in use that use the Borland Database Engine (BDE), an obsolete data access layer designed for
use with desktop databases such as Access, that never scaled well on networks and is particularly dumb
about transaction-driven data management. The biggest problem is blocked garbage collection that
forces them to do a backup/restore every night and to throw a lot of hardware into it to compensate
for the performance degradation as garbage accumulates throughout the day.

Despite the current not-so-healthy state of the application architecture, the 4x Xeon machine is
about 50 per cent utilised. Those old BDE apps are due for replacement this year with a new
application set that uses three-tier architecture and connection pooling, using a direct data access
interface in the Delphi middleware. They expect that when this is sorted out, they will get a
substantial amount of hardware reserve with current equipment, enough to handle all their growing
needs for the next five years.

OneDomain, niche business intelligence systems

Location: Birmingham, Al, U.S.A.

Contact: Ed Salgardo Snr

OneDomain is a rapidly growing Birmingham, Alabama-based software company that develops and
markets media planning, research, and business intelligence software to television stations across
the United States. The primary product, called ClearView, allows broadcast salespeople to analyze
TV ratings and target their approaches to selling time slots to advertisers. Following incorporation
in October 2001, our first two years were spent in product development. Only 24 months after our
first major software release in November 2003, OneDomain earned a 20% market share and it is
more like 30% now.

Conceptually, our application architecture is really client/server but we use Citrix [Metaframe
Terminal Server] to make it kind of “thin” for the clients by running the application in a
chunk of memory at the server and not at the client.

We have a server with the Firebird 1.5.2 database and several (upwards of six) Citrix servers hitting
it. We use a thick Win32 client, written in Delphi, that runs on the regular Citrix servers and
provides the users with an application that acesses the database hosted in the Citrix server machine,
a four-processor machine, using hyperthreading to look like eight processors, and with some 3.5Gb
of RAM available.

We started with Firebird running as SuperServer but quickly changed to Classic for several reasons,
including the memory usage limitations that seriously downgraded performance when things started
getting hot.

With some 800-900 theoretical users, of whom fewer than 300 are likely to be simultaneously
logged in, we have been able to handle the load so far. The good thing about this set up is you can
scale easily if you need to, just by adding more servers.

Moscow Interbank Currency Exchange Bank

Location: Russia

Contact: Sergey Korotkikh

Despite its name, MICEX is the largest stock, foreign currency and derivatives exchange in Russia.
Average daily turnover exceeds $6 billion. As a fully electronic exchange, MICEX has been using
InterBase and, latterly, Firebird, databases since 1994 as the main storage for market data, orders
and trades.

The MICEX Trading System serves more than 2000 users located throughout the whole territory of
Russia in eight time zones. It trades in real time with an average payload of more than a quarter of
a million orders per day, with more than 180,000 concluded trades daily.

In addition, more than 300 electronic broker systems connect to the Trading System via a special
bridge providing a connectivity API. The Trading System itself is “semi-detached” from the
database backend, effectively providing a very fat middleware layer to the database, from and to
which it retrieves and maintains all necessary market and trading information.

Apart from its trading functions, the Firebird database is heavily used by our clearing
activities and reporting. We generate daily trading and clearing reports for all of our almost 1000 members and
send them via e-mail.

Being a key Russian financial exchange, MICEX is obliged to maintain a high level of reliability.
According to the results of an audit done by the Gartner Group, we maintain an availability level of
99.999 per cent.

Star Airlines, France

Location: France

Contact: Fabien Campos

Star Airlines is is a French airline company. Dedicated to tourist traffic, Star operates
scheduled flights mainly to long-haul destinations in Africa and the Middle East, and charter
flights to medium-haul destinations in the Mediterranean.

Firebird is the back-end for the ERP and manages our budget, planes and crew planning,
operational logistics and regulation, invoicing and control.

The Firebird database on a Windows 2000 server is used by 125 concurrent users, five of
whom operate 24/7. About 300 mobile users attach regularly to consult their planning and
messages through a web application.